Placing a chicken breast on the plate, he prepares dinner for her as she sits in her wheelchair, covered in her silvery mantle.
“Even weak electromagnetic fields, and she’s going to be affected,” he slices open a biscuit, buttering each half.
“The TV doesn’t bother you?” I ask Nonna.
“It’s a field I know.”
“She goes into a trance for a few seconds,” Lex explains. “And her nose bleeds, always the left side. When it’s really bad she has a headache and nausea, like being motion sick. She manages okay as long as she has a way to shield herself.”
“Are you feeling better?” I ask her.
“I’m going to need to keep this on when you’re around,” she ominously clutches the space blanket around her as if I’m Typhoid Mary as ART shows me that the disorder Lex describes hasn’t been proven scientifically, and I could have guessed as much.
His grandmother isn’t the only person to report experiencing electromagnetic sensitivity, but research has yet to support that the condition is real. Most believe it’s a manifestation of hysteria or some other disorder. But it’s freaking me out a little that Nonna might have sensed my SIN even if she can’t identify the signals I’m receiving and sending.
“I don’t know what to make of you,” she scrutinizes me suspiciously. “I do feel I’m in the presence of something. I know that sounds kooky, and you wouldn’t be the first to say it. Kind of like believing in extraterrestrials, God, germs, those things you feel but can’t see or explain. Maybe it’s just your intensity I’m honing in on, and why are you wearing sunglasses at night?”
“They’re not really sunglasses. Just tinted,” I reply.
Taking off my PEEPS, I park them on top of my head as I nervously rub my right index finger. And it’s probably my imagination that it’s tingling more than it was.
“What kind of trouble is my boy in?” Nonna wants to know as Lex brings her dinner.
“That remains to be seen,” I reply honestly. “You’re aware of the prepaid phone found in his backpack at the rocket launch? What a lot of people call a burner phone?”
“Yes, yes, and it’s hogwash,” she says as Lex sets her plate on top of a TV tray he moves closer. “He’s never had anything like that in his possession, and didn’t the other night. I should know. I got him all packed and ready to be picked up.”
“Picked up by whom?”
“The teacher who gave him a ride. Lex was so excited I thought he’d pop like a piñata,” she says, as I dig his phone out of my pocket, returning it to him.
00:00:00:00:0
I TEXT FRAN the address on Lost Farm Road, warning her that it’s as dark as pitch in the mobile home park, and I’m uncertain what we’re walking into.
Dress accordingly, I add our euphemistic code for gearing up. Specifically, I’m talking about body armor, and tactical boots, gloves and helmets. I want gas masks, large flashlights, and our Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns.
Do we want HPD BU? she writes back, and I reply, no.
We don’t want the Hampton Police Division or any other backup at this time.
I tell Fran to meet me in 15 minutes as Nonna dips her fork into a mound of mashed potatoes and gravy. She dips a butter-drenched crust of biscuit into a puddle of honey, stabbing a chunk of fried chicken into a dollop of hot sauce.
It’s almost more than I can bear, and I resent having a real problem, a worse one than before, my cravings off the charts. After what I ate on the way here, I shouldn’t be hungry. But I’m ravenous, and I fully intend to confront Dick about this particular manufacturing error. My SIN should remove temptations instead of making them stronger, and if I were a vehicle, I’d demand a recall.
“I’m sorry you didn’t know me before,” Nonna volunteers as if I asked a question. “I’m 75 years old, and until 18 months ago could do anything. Far more than a lot of people decades younger.”
She says she could have kept up with me, and I seem in reasonably good shape. I’m probably the type who works hard at it, watching calories, exercising.
“While I barely had to try to be lean and mean, fit as a fiddle,” she says. “Any-hoodles, nothing like a lightning strike to change your destiny in the blink of an eye.”
“What lightning strike are you referring to?” I act like I know nothing about it while ignoring her insinuations about my appearance.
“Well, I don’t think they’re given names like hurricanes,” she shakes open a napkin. “June before last I was outside with the hose, washing a MINI Cooper we don’t have anymore. It was about to storm, and next thing you know, I’m on the ground. They said it was a seizure.”
“It wasn’t,” Lex is back in the kitchen, getting out baggies and aluminum foil. “I was riding home on my bike when I heard the thunder crack. She had a nosebleed like she still gets, and this weird fernlike burn pattern called arborescence on her back. Also, the silver-plated steel necklace she had on burned her and became mildly magnetic. So that’s not a seizure.”
“It doesn’t sound like it,” I have to agree.
“An act of God, not some medical misfortune. But either way this is what I’m left with,” Nonna says as she eats. “Barely mobile enough to drag myself in and out of bed. And there are other side effects.”
At times she has an overwhelming awareness that she’s living in virtual reality. Now and then while sleeping, she feels she’s moving in and out of multiple dimensions. And on occasion she has flashbacks of being adjusted and tampered with by beings from another planet.
“As part of their ongoing experimentation with what they created down here,” Nonna adds. “And heaven knows what a mess they’ve made when they didn’t mean to, as you might expect. But the end result is I can’t walk anymore.”
She cuts off bites of chicken, dipping them in honey and hot sauce, eating as if she’s never in a hurry.
“And I don’t like anybody touching me,” she adds. “I don’t care who it is. I got zapped and woke up not wanting any physical contact with anything or anyone.”